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Printed letters, October 28, 2013

The Affordable Healthcare Act, or Obamacare, is having a rough rollout. If we had the estimated $24 billion the American economy lost due to the actions of Sen. Ted Cruz’s fool-playing with the stability of the American dollar and our future, the rollout and necessary health care outreach could have had more resource support.

Programmers were not “essential.”

Veterans, do you remember when the Veterans Administration nationally changed over to electronic records in the late 1990s? The VA here in Grand Junction was a “beta” or test site. All personnel were responsible for changing over to and proficiently using the electronic programs as quickly as possible. Simultaneously, the nursing staff began using bar code medication administration. Consequently, it was a whole new way to do business.

It literally took a year for the staff to start trusting the electronic digital records. As one of only a few beta sites, the staff at the Grand Junction VA was responsible for communicating necessary changes to the programming.

Huge digital programs like these take time and a lot of coordinated effort to make a workable product. Each user’s experience makes that of the next user smoother and more productive. Time is the most important element for the programming, and patience is the most important attribute for the users.

llness care in the U.S. is grossly overrated. The ACA is a new way to approach the health state of our population. It focuses more resources on upfront care, namely prevention. Preventative health access can and will turn our illness-focused care into true health care. If you are eligible and have not registered due to a brain-dead principle, I refuse to pay your emergency bill.

BENITA PHILLIPS

Palisade

Obamacare will increase cost of premiums and deductibles

The president is sticking to his guns, insisting that Obamacare is a great law. Many are already benefiting from it. Like most laws liberals promote, it isn’t about the overall results or the cost.

This law does require that many provisions be added to existing policies right now that many insured have no need for, like maternity coverage. That has resulted in sky-rocketing premiums and higher deductibles for those already insured. Many insurance companies are dropping policies for many who are currently insured because they are not in compliance with the demands of Obamacare. It’s a good deal for some (if you need maternity coverage), but awful for many others. They lose the ability to keep a policy or build a new one that suits their individual needs. This additional cost is an indirect tax.

The penalty for not having coverage next year is $95 or 1 percent of your income. That tax goes up significantly in future years. The reality of these indirect and direct taxes will shock lots of people. You think things are bad with the Obamacare website? Wait until you see how bad this law is in its fine print.

The Supreme Court got it right when it upheld this law. The president likes to point this out. The court said Obamacare is all about taxes. Those taxes cannot be hidden much longer. We the people still have the right to elect politicians who don’t increase taxes. In the end we will decide how good this law is.

DAVE KEARSLEY

Mesa

Global warming causes effects that will create more warming

The problem with human-caused global warming is that it is cumulative over time. Greenhouse gases last 100 years, and the current population is near 7 billion and still going up.

A bigger problem with global warming is unforeseen consequences creating and reinforcing even more global warming. These include methane releases from permafrost thawing (already happening), undersea methane releases and humans rebuilding and living unsustainably in flood-prone coastal areas.

The federal government should not be subsidizing rebuilding in flood-prone coastal areas. While a good economy is a good foundation for sustainability, sustainability is a greater foundation for the economy. In the future, most people will know that burning nonrenewable fossil fuels is a weakness.

THOMAS MOONEY

Aspen

FMHS soccer team happy to compete at Walker Field

The Fruita Monument boys soccer team set a goal early this year to win the SWL and host a state playoff game — which it had not done for 20 years.

To help realize this dream, the boys continually visualized playing this game at CMU’s Walker Field. When the bracket was first announced, the game was originally scheduled to be played at Canyon View — a great playing field but not very spectator-friendly.

Thanks to the diligent hard work of Denny Squibb at Fruita Monument, Paul Cain with District 51 and Jermaine Williams at CMU, the site was changed to the beautiful CMU venue.

As head coach, I know how hard these boys have worked to accomplish this goal. I also appreciate all of the valley’s soccer enthusiasts who came together and attended the game. Thank you for your support. I also want to thank The Daily Sentinel and local broadcast media for their coverage this season.

First, for “liberals” who do care “about the overall results or the cost” of the Affordable Care Act (“ACA”), recent studies by the Center for American Progress and the Kaiser Family Foundation found that —“overall”—the market-driven competitive forces harnessed by “ObamaCare’s” health insurance exchanges are lowering overall premium levels by 16% beneath those originally projected by the CBO.

Second, even though “liberals” (in contrast to the “conservatives” who enacted Medicare Part D) insured that the ACA was fully paid for by new taxes, these lower premiums reduce the CBO’s projection of overall subsidy costs by $190 billion over ten years.

Third, while requiring provisions covering maternity care, the AFA also prohibits gender discrimination, annual and/or lifetime caps, coverage-evading “death panels”, and denials for “pre-existing conditions”. As a result of these tradeoffs, some premiums increased (particularly for substandard policies), while other decreased. Thus, Kearsley’s focus on anecdotal particulars obscures the very “overall results” he accuses “liberals” of ignoring.

Fourth, because of Repugnicans’ on-going misinformation campaign and the inexcusable problems with the web-site roll-out, many would-be health insurance purchasers don’t even know yet what their new premiums would be after accounting for subsidies. Thus, as Gary Harmon reports (“For senator, a sampler platter of jobs”), one local told Senator Bennet that his premiums would double, but hadn’t yet consulted “ColoradoConnect”.

Fifth, Kearsley is correct that the penalty (for a single person) in 2014 for not having coverage will be the greater of $95 or 1% of taxable income, increasing to $325/2% in 2015, and $695/2.5% thereafter—incentivizing those who can afford health insurance to decide whether to pay the tax penalty “for nothing”, or apply it toward buying coverage.

By M. Todd Miskel - Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Ms. Phillips says she refuses to pay my emergency room bill if I don’t sign up for Abomination-care. Well, you don’t have to worry as I have employer furnished insurance…for now…with a measley $2500 deductible…lol. If they drop it, and I have to buy it, my household income may qualify me for her taxes to pay for my care anyway.

I almost believe we’d be better off with Canadian-Style socialized medicine rather than this Obamacare monstrosity.

There’s no provision in Obamacare capping the rate increases and deductible increases the insurance companies are going to implement. An estimated 50-75% of current policy holders who want to keep their current plans are starting to receive their cancellation notices with offers of new plans at 5 to 10 times the cost.

We’re just going to end up with a bigger medically uninsured problem than we had before this all started.